This is a wooden panel measuring 35.5 x
25.5 cms on which a velodrome is printed or silk screened probably by hand.

This board belongs to the
unpublished games
section of the site. I purchased it from Sean Hages from
Hamtramck, Michigan, who said that the game came from "a box of stuff from my mother's great grandmother".
Of course, this information must be taken with a pinch of salt, not because I
doubt from Sean's word but because it is impossible to be sure that the contents
of the box have remained untouched all these years unless the box has been
locked in a security bank vault. However, my guess is that the game is at
least from the 1930s (by "at least" I mean that it may be older, see below), so
Sean's story makes sense.

I received the game with a pair of old hand-made
bone dice, which are probably not related to the game.
Of course the inscription "Throw Again" on some squares makes it clear that it is a
dice game, though we cannot be sure with how many dice the game was originally
played.

There were no riders or counters included with the
game, nor a game box or rule sheet.However,
the instructions on the track are pretty straightforward (except for
the mysterious "TIE" square which for which I am not able to give an
interpretation... any ideas?), and it is possible that a separate rule sheet was
never made.

My guess is that this game is part of a very small
run (or even maybe one of a kind) made locally by an amateur maker.

As you can see, there are four tracks, and since
there are no hints of the possibility of changing lanes, we must assume that the
riders were placed on the "START" square, and that every rider would run on their own
lane until the end of the race (most probably one lap).

What is unusual is that the tracks are very
unbalanced. The two inner tracks are 40 squares long, while the two outer tracks
are 64 squares long. Each track has the mentioned "TIE" and a "HEADER Lose the
race" square. Apart from those, the inscriptions on each track are different. One
would think that this is meant to balance the race, with the inscriptions on the
outer tracks compensating for the extra length of these tracks. Surprisingly,
this is not exactly so.

If we add up (a) the "AHEAD" values of each track and
we subtract the "BACK" values -including the "BACK TO START" which has
different values depending of where it is located-, and (b) the "THROW AGAIN"
squares to which we subtract the "MISS A TURN" ones, we have the following
results:

This is a heavily unbalanced game, which makes me
think that whoever made it was not an expert game maker, and not too good with
probability
calculations.

(By the way, which is the best track depends on
whether the game is played with one or two dice. I leave the math up to you).

Another weird thing about this game is that the
track has been printed or silk screened in two halves, and the instructions in the
game squares are counter the sense of the race on the second half of the track. The riders turn
anticlockwise on the track, and they find the first instructions in the natural
direction of the race (if they were human, and this was a real racing track,
they could read the messages) and upside down in the second part of the race.

The riders' images on the board, found only on the
starting and "header" squares, relate vaguely to turn-of-the-century riders. If
we accept that most games, being popular culture artifacts, reproduce
contemporary riders, the game could be even older than my first estimation.
However, the amateurish production of this game may account for some anachronism.

In case you wonder, my 1930's estimation is based
on the look-and-feel of the board when I have it in my hands, but I admit this
is not the most scientific dating.

Thanks Sean for emailing me about the game in the
first place, and for selling it to me at a fair price later.